'Al Qaeda has sealed its future': Syria's jihadists may be the biggest winners of Assad's 'victory' at Palmyra

Residents
hold a Nusra Front flag during a demonstration celebrating their
takeover of Idlib about a month ago and calling for the
implementation of the Sharia law, in Aleppo on April 24,
2015.Hosam
Katan/Reuters

Pro-regime forces recaptured the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra
from ISIS over the weekend, dealing a blow to one of the
terrorist group's most strategically and symbolically valuable
strongholds in Syria.

But analysts say that the victory, while significant, serves the
dual purpose of buying time and legitimacy for embattled Syrian
President Bashar Assad as his country enters its fifth year of
civil war.

That, in turn,constitutesa
significant blow to Syria's revolution— and a boon
for the jihadists who thrive off Syrians' discontent with the
regime.

"The capture of Palmyra is an invaluable opportunity for
the Assad regime and Russia to now proclaim themselves as capable
and willing partners in the fight against ISIS," Syria
expert Charles Lister, a fellow at the Middle East
Institute,
wrote on Mondayin a daily briefing.

He added, however, that a "sustainable long-term battle
against terrorism in Syria will only be possible" with Assad
gone.

"ISIS continues to benefit from the widespread
disenchantment Syrians feel to their political system and
leadership," Lister wrote.

And the same goes for Al Qaeda.

"By proclaiming itself specifically as a revolutionary
movement fundamentally opposed to the Assad regime, Al Qaeda has
sealed its future in part to that of Bashar al-Assad. Should one
remain, the other will invariably survive also," he said.

A
member of Al Qaeda's Nusra Front takes down a picture of Syrian
President Bashar Assad in the city of Ariha, after a coalition of
insurgent groups seized the area in Idlib Province on May 29,
2015.Ammar
Abdullah/Reuters

Many experts have noted that Assad's latest victory against
ISIS — aka the Islamic State, ISIL, or Daesh — at Palmyra will
make him only less likely to accept a political transition that
results in his ouster. Theregime said as much in a
statement released immediately following Palmyra's
capture.

"This achievement proves that our brave army, aided by the
friends, is the only effective force capable of fighting
terrorism and eradicating it," it said, according to the
state-run Syrian Arab News
Agency.

Fred Hof, a former special adviser for
transition in Syria under then US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, told Business Insider that the assault on Palmyra "marks
the beginning of phase two of a Russian military offensive
designed to rehabilitate Assad."

"Phase one aimed to save Assad from military defeat at the
hands of nationalist rebels and to bolster the regime's position
in Geneva peace negotiations," Hof said by email. "Phase two aims
to rehabilitate Assad internationally, using ISIS as a
foil."

ISIS has been battling anti-Assad rebels for control over
territory in eastern Syria for more than two years, as pro-regime
forces bolstered by Iran-backed proxy militias have been focused
on regaining territory in Aleppo and Damascus, as well
as Latakia further west.

"We must not forget that the Assad regime
purposefully ignored ISIS gains in Syria for nearly 18 months —
April 2013 to August 2014 — as they proved an effective
counterweight to the mainstream opposition," Lister said.

'It feeds into Assad's narrative'

The regime's assault on Palmyra comes just more than a week
before world powers are due to resume peace talks in
Geneva.

"Now there is a convergence of interests worldwide about
the fact that ISIS really needs to be confronted," Fawaz
Gerges, a Middle East expert at the London School of Economics,
told Reuters on Monday. "It feeds into Assad's narrative
about Syria being a bulwark against Islamic
State."

Even before civil war broke out in 2011,
analysts accused Assad of building and maintaining a
jihadist presence in Syria in order to legitimize his own hold on
power, sending them to fight against Americans in Iraq when they
became too much for Assad's government to handle.

Assad provided the essential context for the emergence of IS.
From the outset of the uprising, Assad, Iran, and Russia devoted
an enormous amount of resources to a global disinformation
campaign to present a line on which Assad has staked his survival
— Syria is a binary choice between the dictatorship and a
terrorist opposition. Assad then workedto make it come true.

To that end, when Russian
President Vladimir Putin intervened in the waron Assad's behalf last September, Russian
warplanes targeted Western-backed rebels in the country's
north and west while largely sparing ISIS's heartland in the east.

Institute for the Study of War

Adding to Assad's
apparent momentum is the cessation of hostilities currently in
placebetween the government and moderate rebel
groups. The terms of the truce have allowedthe
regime to target groups it deems "terrorists" while rebels remain
bound to the ceasefire.

"I fear one thing: that the period of the truce will allow
the Assad regime to gobble up what remains of Syria by liberating
areas that are controlled by Daesh (Islamic State) and Nusra,"
amember of the Saudi-backed High Negotiations
Committee — a coalition of mainstream rebel groups — told
Reuters.

On Monday, State Department spokesman John Kirby said that
the White House was "encouraged that there is a sense of
momentum now in the political process that we haven't seen
before."

In the end, Hof noted, those who aim to "appease the Syrian
dictator" in the hopes that he will solve their
problems will be disappointed: "What they
will find is that Syria will continue to hemorrhage human beings
so long as this brutally corrupt regime remains in place."